Amazon Tomfoolery

tom·fool·er·y/ˌtämˈfo͞ol(ə)rē/
Noun: Foolish or silly behavior

Example: Getting caught offering different prices to new customers vs repeat customers in the past in a “test”

They seem to be doing something like it again today:

In the screenshot the left window is logged in to my account, the right is a private browser (no naughty cookies for Amazon to use to identify me), copy/pasted the URL to both sides to ensure that I’m looking at identical items on both sides.

Note the Kindle price varies from $7.99 to $6.39.

UPDATE: Amazon never did respond. Shame.

iTunes sucks

I had a free coupon for some music on iTunes that I was interested in, and having spent more time then I’m comfortable with trying to get iTunes to take less memory then an entire installation of of Vista, I’m reminded of one of my favourite XKCD comics:

I’d still like to know what iTunes is doing with over 640MB of memory, 20% of a quad core 2.4GHz CPU (yes, that’s almost 2GHz devoted entirely to iTunes) since it’s too busy to redraw the screen properly.

Seagate Warranty Service – Two Thumbs Up

This post is just a quick thank-you to Seagate for making the warranty return process simple and easy.

I have a ton of drives spread across my various servers and computers and have more or less standarized on Seagate drives, mainly due to the fact that they’re reasonably priced, perform better then the competition (at least when I’ve tested) and have the best warranty in their class.

Warranties are always up in the air though, they’re only as worthwhile as the company backing the warranty request. I finally had a drive reporting errors, my first in many moons, so I contacted Seagate for warranty.

Starting the process was simple, I used Google to look for Seagate Warranty, supplied the model and serial number, my contact information, put the drive in a box and shipped it off.

Here we are about two weeks later and I have a refurbished drive. According to S.M.A.R.T. the drive is brand new, although it’s not impossible for Seagate to reset the hours-of-operation counter before shipping the drive out.

So thanks Seagate for standing by your products! I’m ordering two more drives and you can get that they too will be Seagate.